Regional inequality is an important issue in geographical research and regional development studies. China's market reform and economic growth have aroused considerable attention to the issue of inequality and social justice. The recent research on economic geography indicates that regional inequality has been playing an important part in coordinated development of regional economy. Although regional inequality is a hot issue in research at home and abroad, the current research ignores the directions as well as the main scalar for regional inequality. With the availability of data, this paper, based on the framework of "Optimal scale, Overall trend, Direction for inequality, Mechanism factors", employs conventional global inequality indexes, scale variance, particular direction index and multi-level regression analysis to examine the regional inequality in Guangdong province from 1978 to 2011. Firstly, with the scale variance and its decomposition, we find that there is an increasing sequence according to the scale variances and their decomposition, which reveals that the scalar variance lower at the smaller scale contributes more to the whole regional inequality. Secondly, we use conventional global inequality indexes including coefficient variance, Gini coefficient, Theil index, Global entropy index and Atkinson Index to explore the overall changing trends of regional inequality in Guangdong and find that since the reform and open-up, they all experienced increasing trends and fluctuated change. Thirdly, using the particular direction index (PDI index), we discover that the main direction of regional inequality in Guangdong is the "core-periphery" structure direction, and the gap between the core-periphery is increasing. However, the regional inequalities of the coast-inland and center-periphery are weakly rising and lessened respectively. Lastly, with the multi-level regression analysis, we discovered that globalization, decentralization, investment and marketization are the four important mechanisms which result in regional inequality. Globalization coupled with decentralization has become the most important mechanism that causes regional inequality between countries and between the core-peripheral areas. Fiscal decentralization, despite its effectiveness in creating a growth-oriented environment in Guangdong, tends to have a negative impact on the equitable development and indirectly aggravates regional inequality. Marketization has potential to mediate the uneven development in Guangdong.
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